The 6 Best Ways To Cure A Hangover

Every Londoner likes a good, stiff drink – or two.

As the glasses start stacking up, you’ll notice that you just downed half a London pub’s worth and you’re drinking alcohol during your period.

The London night out ends, and you get home, ready to start the day, only to have a blaring headache that’s about to make you give up on life. It’s a hangover!

Nobody wants a hangover, but if you like a drink, reality can be a harsh mistress. All you can do now is find a way to stop this painful buzz and move on.

Here are tried and tested ways you can quickly cure a hangover.

1. Start With Your Breathwork

One of the newest ways to cure a hangover is through breathwork, which is a way to regulate your health through proper breathing. Beyond its use as a hangover cure, you can also add it to your morning routine to help improve your circulation and relieve some stress and anxiety, especially when you feel a bit of fatigue.

Here’s how you do it.

Start with a full, deep breath, inhaling as much air as you can through your nose or mouth. Once you finish inhaling, exhale as slowly and as naturally as possible. Do this between 30 to 40 times, creating a rhythm between breaths. Once you complete the reps, get ready for the final breath.

On the last breath, breathe in as strongly as you can, adding as much power you can muster. Exhale everything and hold your breath for as long as you can control. Then, breathe fully and save it again for 15 to 20 seconds, then do it 5 to 6 more times.

Why does it?

The process works by regulating your blood oxygen levels and how your body takes on pain. It doesn’t eliminate the hangover fully, but it should give you the relief that you need.

2. Hydrate Yourself

One of the biggest causes of hangovers is dehydration, mostly coming from alcohol acting as a diuretic. As you drink more alcohol, you also urinate more, which causes you to lose more water in your body. So, if your hangover includes nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, you’re likely extremely dehydrated.

If you’re dehydrated, you need to start stocking up on fluids. Drink as much water as you can at an average pace, or even just a few sips to keep you going. If you have electrolyte drinks or oral rehydration salts, this should make the entire process much simpler.

While trying to rehydrate yourself, it’s essential to move away from drinking other diuretics. Beverages like coffee, tea, and soft drinks can make you pee some more, hence giving you a worse headache than you had before.

3. Eat A Hearty Breakfast

When you have a hangover, one of the most common cures is a hearty breakfast. It may not make sense, but it’s a scientific fact that it can help weaken the symptoms of a hangover. The secret comes from what’s in your breakfast.

As you doze the night away, you slowly digest your meal. Sleeping and overnight digestion is basically fasting with extra steps, so you wake up with low blood sugar. Low blood sugar contributes further to the after-effects of a hangover, including the much-dreaded headache.

A nice, hot and healthy meal should give you the necessary sugars that your body needs, avoiding common diet mistakes. You’d want a breakfast that is heavy on sugars, carbs, and proteins. Who doesn’t want a nice, delicious breakfast after you’ve enjoyed some booze from the night before, right?

4. Take The “Hair of the Dog”

If you ask a random sailor, or any avid drinker if you don’t have a salty mariner conveniently close by, a well-known hangover remedy is the “hair of the dog.” The treatment says that taking another drink once you wake up can help relieve most of the symptoms of a hangover and even get you over the pain.

While drinking to handle the pain caused by drinking sounds absurd, there’s some science behind it. For starters, the body undergoes a tailspin during bouts of withdrawal symptoms. As you pass out and sleep through the night, you experience the effects of sudden withdrawal once your blood alcohol volume starts to go down.

Taking the “hair of the dog” can help relieve some of the effects of your withdrawal symptoms. However, you need to be careful! Taking another shot may get you in an endless cycle. Sure, you won’t feel the effects of the hangover, but you’re not recovering either.

5. Take Some Pain Relievers

There’s nothing that can defeat a good old pain reliever. When the worst pain comes around, you’ll thank yourself for popping something for the pain. However, you must be careful as not every pain reliever is a good match for a hangover.

Over-the-counter (OTC) pain relievers like aspirin and ibuprofen, as well as other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), should do the job. Of course, you’d want a good medication to clear the headache, as well as the pain across your entire body. Then again, don’t take acetaminophen/paracetamol for a hangover.

Also known as Tylenol, acetaminophen can irritate your digestive system, as well as damage your liver. Other NSAIDs should be fair game, so keeping a small bottle beside your bed or on your bag should make the following day a little less painful. Often herbal remedies can offer pain relief too.

6. Get Some Restful Sleep

When it comes to a hangover, there’s nothing more powerful and as effective as sleep. Dozing off after you drink, as well as sleeping a little more than usual, gives you enough downtime to clear your body’s toxins. While you sleep, you also won’t experience much of the symptoms of your hangover.

You want at least 8 to 12 hours of restful sleep, with the operative word being “restful.” Passing out after drinking is not relaxing, and you can expect that the few hours after heavy drinking won’t be either. So, after hydrating yourself and popping a pain reliever, catch up on some Zs. Then, stay under the covers and start your way towards recovery.

Control your environment as you sleep. Close the windows and turn down the lights. Keep the room at the temperature that you prefer and enjoy the downtime. Your body will thank you for it.

The Bottom Line

There are many hangover cures out there, ranging from outrageous to dull. Unfortunately, there are only a few cures out there that will help prevent your hangover pain from racking your brains out.

A night of binge drinking can be a problem, but these strategies should give you an edge when it comes to your next drinking session. Drinking moderately can also help but, with good friends and better booze, you likely need our hangover cures.